The Progress of Love

brought in greasy, delicious-smelling brown bags from the diner around the corner. French fries, hamburgers, jumbo hot dogs, doughnuts. Girls who were dieting cursed and slammed their doors as these smells went up the stairs.
    From time to time, MaryBeth’s sister Beatrice was dieting. She drank vinegar to take away her appetite. She drank glycerine to strengthen her fingernails.
    “She wants to get a boyfriend—it makes me sick,” MaryBeth said.
    When MaryBeth and Beatrice were friends, they borrowed each other’s clothes without asking, cuddled in bed, and told each other how their hair looked from behind. When they weren’t, they stopped speaking. Then MaryBeth would cook up a rich bubbly mess of brown sugar, butter, and coconut on the hot plate, and wave the fragrant saucepan under Beatrice’s nose before she and I commenced eating it with spoons. Or she would go to the store and buy a bag of marshmallows, which she claimed were Beatrice’s favorite thing. The idea was to eat them in front of her. I didn’t like to eat marshmallows raw—their puffy blandness slightly disgusted me—but MaryBeth would pop one into her mouth and hold it there like a cork, sticking her face in front of Beatrice’s. Not quite knowing how to behave at such times, I would go through the closet.
    MaryBeth’s father didn’t want her living with him, but he gave her plenty of money for clothes. She had a dark-blue winter coat with a squirrel collar that I thought luxurious. She had many drawstring blouses, a fashion of the time—pink, yellow, mauve, sky blue, lime green. And a coveted armload of silver bangles. Two all-round pleated skirts I remember—navy-blue and white, turquoise and cerise. I looked at all these things with more homage than envy. I dangled the heavy bangles on my fingers, inspected the dainty powder puffs and the eyebrow tweezers. I myself was not allowed to pluck my eyebrows, and had to put on my makeup in the washroom of the Town Hall on the way to school. During the school year, I lived in town with my Aunt Ena, who was strict. All I had for a powder puff was a gritty scrap of flannel, decidedly sordid-looking. Beside MaryBeth, I felt that I was a crude piece of work altogether, with my strong legs and hefty bosom—robust and sweaty and ill-clad, undeserving, grateful. And at the same time, deeply, naturally, unspeakably, unthinkably—I could not speak or think about it—superior.
    After the summer holidays, which she spent with her father and stepmother in Toronto, MaryBeth said that we should not walk out on the railway tracks anymore, it might get us a bad reputation.She said that it was the new style to wear a scarf over your hair, even on a sunny day, and she brought back several gauzy squares for this purpose. She told me to choose one, and I chose the pink shading into rose, and she cried admiringly, “Oh, that’s the very prettiest!” So I tried to give it back. We had a pretend-argument, and I ended up keeping it.
    She told me about the things there were to buy in Eaton’s and Simpson’s, and how she nearly got her heel stuck in an escalator, and some unkind things her stepmother had said, and the plots of movies she had seen. She had gone on rides at the Exhibition that made her sick, and she had been accosted by a man on a streetcar. He wore a gray suit and a gray fedora and offered to take her to the Riverdale Zoo.
    Sometimes now I felt myself slipping away while MaryBeth talked. I felt my thoughts slipping off as they did at school during the explanation of a mathematical problem, or at the beginning of the big prayer before the sermon at church. Not that I wished to be elsewhere, or even to be alone. I understood that this was what friendship was like.
    We had decided to change the spelling of our names. Mine was to become Jesse instead of Jessie and hers was to be Meribeth, not MaryBeth. We signed these names to the test papers we turned in at school.
    The teacher waved my paper in the air. “I can’t give a mark to this person, because I don’t know who this person is,” she said. “Who is this Jesse?” She spelled the name out loud. “That is a boy’s name. Does anybody here know a boy named Jesse?”
    Not a word was said about the name Meribeth. That was typical. MaryBeth was a favorite with everybody, on account of her looks and her clothes and her exotic situation, as well as her soft, flattering voice and polite ways. Rough girls and caustic teachers alike were